Hey There Pretty Lady - Nice Gonads

"To the female angler fish the male angler fish is a very loud and annoying and unnecessarily complicated pair of gonads," states ZeFrank in the video True Facts About the Angler Fish. Is this meant to be just about angler fish?

This funny short video may not go down as an all time classic but it's attracted 7.18 million views which is probably more people in a couple of weeks than Charles Dickens ever got to read his racy best seller Bleak House.

As someone who has worked in the media and got all excited when my story achieved 100 views and was most read, although we quickly get over such vainglorious beauty contests, it's rather sobering to think that the number of people viewing one video on YouTube exceeds the population of some nations. Denmark, for example, has 5.5 million people.

You can potentially do a lot with the power of viral, although it's hard to see quite what, given that most of the evil Middle Eastern dictators have now been overthrown.

2012 was clearly the year when this kind of thing went out of control. In 2013 it may go bonkers.

In July 2012 a little know Korean rapper called PSY released something you may have heard called Gangnam Style which has attracted a mere 1.1 billion views to date.

In Britain the distinctive sales pitch of a Pakistani fish seller at a market in the East End of London was picked up by someone who had one eye on the viralsphere whatever-its-called thingy. The result was the One Pound Fish video which has since attracted 11.9 million views.

It reached number 29 in the UK charts which all seems rather irrelevant given the number of hits the song had on YouTube.

One Pound Fish is now going international with an appearance of the fish seller in France. He's heading to the US next.

While I don't want to rain on anyone's parade the expression WTF comes to mind. If you go to any street market in Tunisia or Egypt you'll find sellers with the same, if not an even more amusing technique. If I think about this too hard (and I try not to) this is mildly depressing. My only hope achieving immortality is probably to get a video of a gorilla scratching its backside at the zoo and to take her viral or to try to get a hormonal giraffe to play the flute.

All of this makes the stars of yesterday seem somewhat eclipsed by comparison. Take, for example, Duran Duran's rather cringing Indian Jones white boys in India routine on Hungry Like the Wolf that has attracted a mere 6 million views on YouTube.

Sorry boys - looks like a slap around the face with a wet angler fish is in order.